Thursday, March 3, 2016

Wavelength's sixteenth anniversary festival was a little less adventurous than last year's sesquidecade spectacular. For the first time in recent memory, the festival settled into one home base for three nights (along with one daytime excursion off-site) and the programming eschewed retrospective turns for a future-focused weekend, daring audiences to invest in the musical here-and-now. The festival's middle night saw the most rock action and the biggest crowd, packed in on a cold night to get sweaty. Soupcans are well known for their vibe — spasmodic noisebursts and a sense of creeping menace — but this set was noteworthy for being one of the best sounding 'Cans outings I can remember. Perhaps still laser-focused with the recent Soft Party out of their systems — or maybe there's something in the water.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Founded as a blog about one curmudgeon's love affair with the em dash, Mechanical Forest Sound has grown to become a community-based archive of local musical culture. Assuming that "independent music" isn't just boys with guitars and "culture" isn't just some sort of pageant, MFS is an investigation of a wide range of artists, reflecting on concerts as shared experiences, acts of citizenship and a chance to get down — fuzzy photographs and clear-sounding original live recordings a specialty.

Current manifestations of this project include Track Could Bend, a monthly concert series featuring "improvised music and weird rock offshoots", presented in a casual environment.

At one point I wrote full-on concert reviews, and for longer I thought I would catch up and write about shows in the past. But these days, because of, y'know, life, do not expect much in the way of full show reviews — but live recordings with blurbs will be posted as quickly after the fact as is feasible.

All MP3's on this blog are audience recordings shared as a reminder of the excitement of seeing live music. If you are an artist who doesn't want their music shared in this way, please contact me and I shall remove it forthwith.